Note: I originally posted this article last summer at a colleague’s request, but I’m re-posting it again now as students and families start to look at summer test-prep options.

If you’re just beginning test-prep this summer and looking into take a class or working with a tutor affiliated with a company, please tread carefully when dealing with the free practice tests offered by these organizations.

Many of these companies do not use official material produced by either the College Board or the ACT, but rather rely on tests written in-house and used only by the company. This is always the case for national chains such as Kaplan and Princeton Review, and is common practice among other companies as well.(more…)

After my recent post discussing why it’s not a good idea to treat real SATs or ACTs like practice runs, a tutor wrote to ask me to weigh in on the ACT’s score-deletion option and its effect on the test-prep process. In truth, I probably should have covered it in my earlier post, but since I didn’t (mea culpa!), I’m going to discuss it here.

So first, for those of you who aren’t familiar with ACT scoring policy, the ACT takes the concept of score choice to a level beyond that of the SAT. Most colleges will allow you to select which set(s) of scores you want to send, but a few holdouts — including several Ivy League schools — still require you to send all of your scores. If you take the SAT, you do in fact need to send everything; however, if you take the ACT, there’s still a back door into score choice.

Basically, the ACT has a policy that allows test-takers to permanently remove a score from their record, provided that it was obtained from a paid registration (that is, not state or district-mandated testing) has not yet been sent to any colleges. All you need to do is submit a written request to the ACT (see here; click on “Scores,” then scroll down to “How do I delete a test-day record?”), and your scores will be permanently expunged.

Obviously, this policy has some major benefits, most notably the fact that you can actually see your scores before deciding whether to delete them. If you walk out of the test thinking you nailed it and then discover that wasn’t quite the case when you get your score report a few weeks later, you won’t have to worry about colleges ever seeing them. In contrast, if you want to delete your SAT scores, you must do so without knowing what they are. (The College Board gives test-takers until 11:59pm on the Wednesday following the test to decide whether they want to cancel their scores.)

In theory, this sounds like a great deal. Take the test, see how you do, and if you don’t like the results, all you’ve lost is your registration fee.

If you want, you can sign up the next month and do it again.

And if that doesn’t work, you can sign up the following month and do it again.

And again. And again. And again.

Are you starting to see how this could be a problem?

To be clear, I am by no means suggesting that there aren’t situations in which this policy can really come in handy.

For example, if your practice test scores are inconsistent/borderline and you really, really want to get the test over with, then yes, you can go ahead and sign up without worrying that taking the risk will ruin you. I’ve had students in that situation who were unsure about whether they should take the test in a particular month or wait until the next administration, but they were close enough that the ACT’s policy made it worth it for them try. In their cases, it paid off.

Likewise, there are students who seriously overestimate their abilities, sign up for the test before they’re ready, and then get a very rude awakening. If these students later buckle down and end up raising their scores significantly, they won’t run the risk of having one bad decision influence their admissions prospects.

Those are best-case scenarios.

The worst-case scenario looks like the first ACT student I ever tutored. She had taken the test seven — yes, seven — times before I started working with her, in the spring of her junior year.

Why had she taken the test seven times? Because, she had been told, she could just keep deleting the scores.

Did I mention she attended one of New York City’s top prep schools and was stuck at around a 21?

As I discussed in my other post a few days back, repeated test-taking is also not a good idea from a psychological perspective. First most students will inevitably start to get discouraged when their scores remain flat from test to test. If they do eventually end up in the hands of a capable tutor, the mental stumbling blocks can pose just as big a problem as the content-based ones.

I speak from experience here: for a number of my “second-round” students, half the game just involved convincing them that yes, they were actually capable of improving. It was some of the most nerve-wracking tutoring I ever did. The kids were on edge, the parents were on edge and begging the kids to give it one more real go, and both of them just wanted the whole thing to be over with already.

There’s also the fact that students who know they can always sit for a test again tend to take each individual administration less seriously than they otherwise would. Why bother, if there’s always another chance? The result is that a process that could be gotten over with quickly ends up taking months longer than necessary. It also reinforces an attitude that is not particularly helpful for college, or life for that matter. College professors and bosses don’t necessarily accept re-takes, even when the stakes are high. It’s generally better to treat things as if they count the first time around.

Then there’s the unfortunately reality that scores tend to stay more or less stable after the third test.

A couple of months back, I ran across a horrible article in which a supposed test-prep expert talked about how wealthy students were gaming the college admissions process by taking standardized tests over and over again, and getting tutored in between, until they hit their target scores.

The truth, however, is that while students may occasionally hit their goals after, say, test #5, those with the savviest parents (or the savviest tutors) rarely take the test for real more than three times, four at absolute most.

These students still take plenty of tests, but they’re more likely to pay for private proctored practice tests, which allow them to work out the kinks before going in for the real thing. They have people making sure they take the process seriously, and that they try their hardest when it counts.

Part of the reason that realistic adult guidance is important here, especially for lower-scoring students, is that there tends to be a correlation between students’ scores and their capacity to self-evaluate. From what l’ve observed, lower-scoring students are more likely to overestimate their abilities, and to underestimate the amount of work necessary to improve.

They are also more likely to fall prey to the “maybe I’ll luck out and do really well this time” mentality. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that way. For students in this category, total score choice is a curse in disguise; it gives them an excuse not to have to confront their weaknesses and allows them to indulge in wishful thinking. (I’ve witnessed this phenomenon in action as well, and it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to counteract.)

My other concern about over-relying on score choice is strictly practical. It is very easy to intend to cancel a scores but then never actually get around to doing so. People get busy, they procrastinate, they forget… These things just have a way of happening. If you’re not careful, you could easily end up unintentionally sending a score that you should have asked the ACT to delete months ago.

So the bottom line is that if you want to take advantage of the ACT’s score choice policy to and try to get the test over with early, that’s certainly fair.

Under almost no circumstances, however, would I recommend that someone sign up for the real test without taking at least one practice test first. Buy the Red Book (or if you don’t want to buy it, sit with it in the bookstore), block off a couple of hours, and see how you do. If you’re scoring in or close to your target range right off the bat, it’s probably worth a shot, even it’s early in the year; there’s no sense in prolonging things unnecessarily.

But make no mistake: although ACT-style score choice can be a boon in the right situation, it is not the solution to all your test-prep woes. You still have to put in the time and study, and you still have to take the process seriously. Eventually, “one more time” runs out, and you have to accept where you are. It’s up to you to use the time you have to your own best advantage.

When this happened, I was inevitably struck by the desire to respond with, “And your parents were paying how much for this?” but I always managed to restrain myself.

As I’ve discovered over the course of my investigations into the world of tutoring, effective and ineffective tutoring comes in a variety of shapes and sizes.

Complicating the issue is the fact that what works perfectly for one student might be a train wreck for another.

I’m the first to admit that not every student I ever worked with improved. After some early successes, I found myself in a few disappointing situations that taught me some very hard yet important lessons about the limits of my abilities, and about just what is and is not subject to a quick fix.

Those experiences made me much more cautious as a tutor, much more upfront about what I likely could and could not accomplish.

They also taught me about the danger of generalizing about one’s absolute competence as a teacher based on experiences involving only one particular type of student.

Thanks to the Internet, I worked with students who attended elite boarding schools in the northeast, ones who were homeschooled in the south, and everything in between. Their SAT scores ranged from the 300s to the high 700s, and their ACT scores from the low 20s to the mid 30s. Some of them made immediate progress, while others plugged away for months.

They forced me to stop taking for granted that high school students – even high-scoring ones – had the same basic understanding of the world as adults, and to stop making assumptions about what they did and did not know.

So with that disclaimer, I’d like to outline some of the tutoring attitudes and “types” I’ve encountered that can result in less than stellar results. Some are inherently problematic, while others only become so when paired with the wrong student.

1) The Test-Giver

Aka scenario #1 from the beginning of this post. These tutors show up week after week and diligently go over homework with students, but only explain concepts in context of the questions the student answered incorrectly. They work through new material with students rarely, if ever.

To be fair, this approach can be extremely effective if students are at the point where they already know all the material well and just need to be held accountable for studying and to practice taking full-length sections/tests.

But if a student is still shaky on some of the content, or is just starting the tutoring process, then this is usually not the best approach. Students end up learning concepts only in the context of particular questions. When the concept is tested differently, in other questions – something that is almost guaranteed to happen – they might not make the connection.

Much of test prep falls into this category. If this is the kind of tutoring you need, great. If not, beware.

2) The Lecturer

Aka, scenario #2 from the beginning of this post.

I do not typically subscribe to clichés about traditional, lecture-based instruction, but the stereotypes about boring, droning professors do exist for a reason. So while I am a big fan of explicit instruction, I am also the first person to state that tutoring is usually most effective when it takes the form of a conversation. Students have to be engaged. Obviously. Otherwise, it just doesn’t work. And any tutor who sits and rambles on without recognizing that a student isn’t paying attention probably isn’t going to be much help.

3) The Ooey-Gooey Progressive

This is the flip side of #2.

I think I’ve made my feelings about the shortcomings of progressive education crystal clear, most notably here, so I’m not going to go into too much detail. But in a nutshell, this is the tutor who has so thoroughly imbibed the kool-aid about the importance of “discovery” learning that they are hesitant to directly teach at all.

Although sessions may be fun and highly interactive, they also tend to waste lots of time and result in less learning than would occur if tutors simply explained things in clear, straightforward language. These tutors are determined to have students “discover” every process on their own, and as a result, concepts that could easily be taught in five minutes end up taking up half an hour – and still remain fuzzy.

Note that this is a particular problem with performing artists who tutor on the side.

4) The Smarty Pants

By definition, tutors tend to be a pretty accomplished group. But here’s the problem: tutoring isn’t about how much the tutor knows, but rather whether the tutor can effectively convey that information in such a way that the student can both retain it and apply it under pressure.

Tutors who are more interested in showing off their knowledge than with trying to communicate in terms students can both comprehend and retain, tend not to be particularly successful in that regard.

The reality is that most students are less concerned with where a tutor went to college than with whether that person can make their life easier. Dumping too much advanced terminology or complex explanations on an already overwhelmed high school junior is a recipe for disaster.

The bottom line is that aiming for “deep” understanding in the short term is not always a good idea; sometimes shallow understanding is a much more practical goal. That can be a very hard pill to swallow for someone more accustomed to Ivy League seminar rooms, but a big part of teaching involves meeting people where they are and understanding the constraints of the situation at hand.

5) The Trickster

This is the flip side of #4.

These tutors have their standard set of “tricks” and strategies that they give to everyone, regardless of a particular student’s level. They may know the tests extremely well, but usually their actual subject knowledge doesn’t quite match up.

Again, these tutors can sometimes be highly effective, but usually only when working with students who are already solid on the basics and just need to learn to apply their knowledge to the test.

The problem arises that when a student’s actual knowledge is too shaky to allow them to apply those “tricks” effectively, or even to recognize when they are relevant. When a student in this category does need a more thorough review of the fundamentals, the tutor may be unable to provide what the student needs at the required level of depth. (He or she may also stick to working with the prep books they’re most comfortable/familiar with, regardless of how well they reflect the actual test.)

In some cases, these tutors may substitute strategy for content, instructing students in the minutiae of marking answer right and wrong choices (and allowing them to hem and haw over those choices) while focusing less on more efficient/effective ways to solve the actual problems. Working through answer choices systematically is indeed important, but for a student just starting out, this probably isn’t the best thing to focus on.

And at worst, these tutors may insist that certain things that are in fact teachable “can’t really be taught,” mistaking their own lack of knowledge for an inherent limitation.

6) The Underestimator

Tutors in this category systematically underestimate how much reinforcement students need to master new concepts (a whole lot).

Importantly, this is true for strategy as well as content. Some students may need to repeatedly practice how to work through questions before they can be fully trusted to go through the steps on their own during the real test.

7) The Overestimator

This is the corollary to #6. Some tutors may underestimate the amount of repetition students require while simultaneously overestimating the amount of knowledge they 1) possess, and 2) can infer/apply.

Such tutors may present a rule or strategy in a very general way, for instance, andassumethat students can deduce all the various applications.

My best example of this came the day I looked at one particular “second-round” student’s grammar notes from his former tutor. The sum total of the instructions for subject-verb agreement read “cross out the stuff between the subject and the verb.”

What “stuff” was never specified – had anyone ever told him? Could he recognize when subjects and verbs were separated by “stuff?” Did he know what prepositions were, and could he recognize them well enough to identify prepositional phrases placed between subjects and verbs? Could he even identify subjects and verbs consistently, and was he aware of all the different parts of speech that could serve as subjects?

And those were only a sampling of the issues involved in a single type of question.

It’s back to school time… which is right about when high school juniors and their parents often start to think about prep options for the SAT or ACT. In recognition of that fact, I’m planning to devote the next few posts to issues involving tutoring and classes: what to know, what to ask, and how to decide which option is right for you.

While there are many factors to consider when choosing a tutor, there are a handful of warning signs that should cause you to run in the opposite direction. As a “second-round” tutor whose students often worked with one or more tutors before me, I had ample opportunity to learn about all manners of ineffective teaching.

I’d like to cover one of the biggest red flags here.

So, the number one thing that an SAT or ACT tutor should NOT say when teaching grammar is (drumroll, please)… “Just use your ear.”

(Or: “Just try to hear if it sounds right.” Or, when commas are involved: “Does it feel like you need a pause there?” Or any equivalent statement.)

For the record, there are exceptions, most notably idiom questions, which can only be answered by ear. In addition, some constructions, particularly on the ACT, sound so obviously and overwhelmingly wrong that parsing the exact nature of their incorrectness is a waste of time.

But as a general rule, anyone who encourages students to rely on their ears at the expense of actually learning the grammatical rules tested is not qualified to be tutoring these tests, or at least the English/Writing sections.

First, that statement is based on the assumption that students are capable of identifying correct answers by ear. If that were the case, however, those students probably wouldn’t need tutoring in the first place!

Second, although English is obviously more subjective than math, the reality is that standardized test grammar is closer to the latter than it is to the former. The SAT and the ACT cover a specific set of grammatical concepts, which are consistently tested in more or less the same format. Some of these concepts may be more flexible in real life, but these tests are not concerned with real-world exceptions and nuances.

The exact context in which concepts are presented will of course change, and concepts might be combined in slightly novel ways, but for the most part, things are quite straightforward. If you’ve assimilated the rules thoroughly and understand how to apply them, you get the questions right; if you haven’t, you don’t.

Commas, for example, are correctly used in four primary instances: before a coordinating conjunction (usually and or but) to join two independent clauses; before an independent clause preceded by a dependent clause; to set off non-essential clauses that can be removed from a sentence without affecting its essential meaning; and between the items in a list.

Sometimes, it may seem natural to insert a pause in these situations, but that is ultimately irrelevant. The issue is not whether a pause make sense, but whether a comma is grammatically required.

Even students who are exceptionally well-read and who can rely on their ears in most situations can almost always benefit from studying the logic behind questions they understand intuitively.

It is exceedingly unlikely that any tutor would ever encourage a student to think of answers to math questions in terms of whether they seemed natural (“Does five feel like a right answer to you?”), yet this attitude is surprisingly common when grammar is concerned.

Part of the problem is that tutors who are natural high-scorers may themselves not be fully aware of why right answers are right and wrong answers are wrong. People who are able to successfully rely on their ears are often unaware of just how much understanding they take for granted.

Regardless of the reason, this approach is also extraordinarily unhelpful and likely to result in considerable frustration, scores that improve only marginally if at all, and possibly months (and months) of wasted time and money.

So if you’re a parent considering hiring a tutoring for your child, it’s worth your while to ask one simple question: how, exactly, do you cover the English/Writing section?

In my previous post, I outlined some of the ways in which the progressive methodologies that pervade much of the American system inadvertently fuel a reliance on the private tutoring industry.

On its surface, the tutoring model would seem to be the holy grail of progressive education. Teachers are encouraged to “personalize” their approach to fit students’ unique learning styles, “empowering” them to “find their passions” and “take ownership of the learning process.” But this perspective is based on both a simplification and a misunderstanding of how teaching and learning actually work.

Oftentimes, tutoring is assumed to be effective simply because it epitomizes personalized learning. But although personalization is a component of what makes tutoring effective, it is far from the only element – nor, I would argue, is it the most important element.

Likewise, the importance of soft factor such as personality “fit” and the ability to inspire is somewhat overblown. Obviously, those factors do count for something. I had students I adored, whom I always looked forward to seeing, and whose families I have remained friendly with for nearly a decade now. I even had one student who genuinely fell in love with English, ended up as editor of his college newspaper, and is now a professional journalist! (To be fair, he was a star in English class before I showed up.)

But the reality is that I also taught students of whom I was not particularly fond; tutoring them was, to be frank, a job. It is unrealistic to expect that any tutor, like any other human being, will get along with every other person with whom they work. The point, though, is that provided those students did their work and showed up diligently, they still improved very significantly.

Conversely, some of the students whom I got along with wonderfully, and who could rhapsodize wide-eyed about their love of learning, never quite seemed to make the kind of improvement they wanted. Almost invariably, these students attended the most progressive schools. Somewhere along the way, they had clearly absorbed the belief that being excited about learning was synonymous with actually learning.

These students were often very enthusiastic, and we had a wonderful time together, but they were somehow unable to put in the necessary practice on their own. I always got the sense that they had never done the kind of work that real improvement would have required – that they literally had no concept of it. Sometimes, they even switched tests in the hopes that their scores would magically rise without their having to put in too much work. Needless to say, that approach did not pay off.

Interestingly, I have several colleagues who regularly find themselves in the position of being “second round” tutors – tutors who are called in after a student has failed to make sufficient progress with another tutor, or even multiple tutors. Like me, they are often stunned at the types of basic information their students’ previous tutors failed to impart, or at least to impart in a way that students were able to absorb. If personalization were truly the issue, these types of scenarios would not occur with such alarming regularity.

I suspect that many, if not most, of these formers tutors are well-meaning, but techniques that are ineffective in the classroom are just as ineffective in one-on-one situations. An adult who lets a student flail around for 15 minutes trying to “discover” a concept that could be easily taught in three is doing a major disservice. I’ve witnessed this kind of teaching, and it’s almost painful to observe. (I have to restrain myself from grabbing tutors by the shoulders, crying, “Just teach it to them already!”) One is left with the impression that these tutors have been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the importance of indirectly “guiding” students that they cannot really see what is happening in front of them.

For their part, students do not generally get overtly upset because they want to please their tutors, and tutors can consequently pat themselves on the back for helping students take control of their own learning. But the result is that basics are made out to be inordinately complicated and confusing, preventing students from ever really getting a handle on the subject or progressing to more advanced activities.

Sometimes this state of affairs goes on for months before it becomes apparent that something just isn’t working. Finally, parents start hunting around for yet another tutor, one who can really get the job done. At that point, they’re eager to have someone knowledgeable and competent, with a demonstrated track record, tell their teenager (and possibly them as well) exactly what to do.

I’ve had several recent discussions with fellow “second-round” colleagues about just what it is that makes the most effective tutors so effective, and the overwhelming consensus is always that the best tutors possess a very particular type of efficiency. Not only do they know their subjects phenomenally well and are able to present them in such a way that students can both retain the material and apply it when it counts, but they can anticipate the problems a student is likely to have and tailor sessions so as to head off those problems before they even have a chance to occur. As a result, they can sometimes accomplish in only a few sessions what another tutor might not be able to accomplish in months.

Not coincidentally, this type of targeted tutoring is highly traditional in many ways – even if it does contain what are usually thought of as progressive elements. It is student-centered insofar as it is targeted to the student’s particular needs; however, its primary aim is not develop unique gifts or creativity (although the student may sometimes discover a new gift as a result) but rather to transmit information in as clear, coherent, and systematic manner as possible, and to ferret out points of weaknesses so that they can be directly addressed.

Although this type of tutoring must be a conversation in which the student is an involved participant, it is a conversation in which the tutor is unapologetic about knowing more than the student does and is fully willing to embrace responsibility for that fact. It also involves very considerable amounts of repetition.

In that regard, it is the polar opposite of pretty much everything current wisdom about education holds dear.

But because this type tutoring is so personalized, and often so engaging, no one really notices its more traditional features. (Indeed, “traditional” and “boring” are so thoroughly conflated in the popular imagination that any teaching that is not boring is automatically assumed not to be traditional.) Besides, when college admission is on the line, educational theories are the last thing anyone worries about. And the inescapable fact is that whatever someone happens to think about it, this type of teaching works.

Thus, tutoring largely escapes the kind of criticism that, in another context, would be heaped on the type of pedagogy it employs.

To come at this from another angle, I think it’s fair to say that the lack of regulation is simultaneously the best and the worst aspect of the tutoring industry. Anyone can throw an ad up on Craigslist and advertise their services, and there are a lot of hacks out there. On the other hand, the lack of oversight means that private tutors are not compelled to march in lockstep with pedagogical fads. They remain free to use techniques more common in 1986, or even 1966, without any fear of pushback. Pragmatism is free to trump ideology.

People who wonder why bright college grads don’t want to go into teaching should look no further than the tutoring industry because there are certainly plenty of them there. If schools don’t offer sufficient autonomy – in my experience, successful tutors tend to be somewhat quirky as well as fiercely independent – the private sector certainly allows these individuals free reign, not to mention potentially far higher compensation.

The supply side only exacerbates the issue.

As more students come through a progressive-inf(l)ected system, college included, fewer and fewer graduates have experience with the most effective type of direct instruction. And people can’t normally teach in a format they haven’t experienced themselves. On this subject, a quick anecdote: A colleague, a decorated AP teacher, told me the story of a group of younger teachers sent in to observe him teach. They had heard he was “traditional” and were astonished to discover that he did not simply talk at his students for the entire class but actually allowed them to ask questions. And this was in a highly ranked district in one of the most educated states in the country.

Furthermore, the promotion of STEM and “practical” (read: business) degrees has also lead to an ever-declining number of students achieving advanced competencies in the humanities. Despite the popular rhetoric about useless English majors working at Starbucks, the reality is that only 6.1% of all college students received degrees in all areas of the humanities combined in 2014.

In addition, humanities departments at many schools are notorious for their lack of rigor as well as their grade inflation. It is usually safe to assume that even English majors have never had to diagram sentences.

The people who do acquire serious skills in the humanities tend to come out of a small group of elite schools and be fairly privileged to begin with. Within that group, the number of people who can also teach well is quite small indeed. An even smaller group actually wants to teach. And don’t even get me started on “soft” factors like reliability.

Now, basic economic theory of course states that decreased supply of an item or skill will cause prices for that item or skill to rise. And nowhere is this clearer than in the private market for test-prep tutoring, where the ability to effectively teach a certain set of skills usually deemed “irrelevant” is actually in very high demand.

As a tutor, I spent a good deal of time covering material I had been directly taught for free, in public school – material that was very clearly foreign to my students. To put it mildly, it always seemed to me that there was something not quite right about that.

Essentially, the direct instruction of crucial skills that used to be – and that should still be – standard fare in classrooms across the country has now become something accessible to a much smaller fraction of students.

Techniques that would be viewed with distaste when associated with less privileged students have been transformed into a coveted marker of status. I know of one Manhattan tutoring firm, famous for its exorbitant rates, whose tutors reportedly dictate notes while students write them word-for-word, by hand.

I do think that this situation is in large part the result of misplaced good intentions. But in seeking to avoid one extreme, it is possible to go too far in the other direction. Pedagogical strategies that are appropriate for preschoolers are far less suited to high schoolers; and to return to one of my favorite themes, what makes students happy in the short term is not necessarily what will serve them best in the long run.

Looking back on my own high school experience, some of the teachers from whom I learned the most were not the inspirational ones, but rather the merely competent and unremarkable ones who, in their own steady, dull way, taught me what it meant to acquire a rock-solid foundation in a subject. For a girl whose parents could not help her with her homework (not until I was out of college did I realize that some of my classmates had probably received that kind of support), and who was only dimly aware of the concept of professional tutoring (which would have been unaffordable anyway), that was not a small thing.

That foundation took me very far in college, and I literally would not be where I am without it. I suspect that those types of teachers are in much shorter supply today. I am sorry for that, and for all the students whose educations will be shortchanged because of allegiance to a theoretical ideal.

Unfortunately, as education schools increasingly promote the teacher-as-facilitator model, other approaches are largely reduced to a caricature. And as teachers come under increasing administrative pressure to employ progressive pedagogies, teachers who don’t fit the mold are unlikely to remain in the classroom for decades the way their predecessors did. That is a shame for the education system – but for tutoring industry, it is a boon.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, I’m often a tutor of last resort. That is, people find their way to me after they’ve exhausted other test-prep options (self-study, online program, private tutor) and still find themselves short of their goals. Sometimes very, very far short of their goals. When people come to me very late in the process, e.g. late spring of junior year or the summer before senior year, there’s unfortunately a limited amount that I can do. Most of it is triage at that point: finding and focusing on a handful of areas in which improvement is most likely.

Not coincidentally, many of the students in this situation who find their way to me have been cracking their heads against the SAT for months, sometimes even a year or more. Often, they’re strong math and science students whose reading and writing scores lag significantly behind their math scores, even after very substantial amounts of prep and multiple tests. They’re motivated, diligent workers, but the verbal is absolutely killing them. Basically, they’re fabulous candidates for the ACT.

When I mention the ACT to them, however, they’re usually a little surprised. First, the SAT is the default option — it’s just what high school juniors in their town do, and have always done. No one has even mentioned the ACT to them. And on the off chance that they do know something about it, they’re suspicious that colleges won’t really weigh it the same as they would the SAT. (Usually they start to reconsider when I tell them about my ACT student who was admitted to Harvard.) Second, the SAT has dominated their lives for months. Switching tests at this point seems like giving up, or at least having to start all over again. No one wants to feel like all the work they put in was a waste, even if it didn’t actually get them what they wanted.

Now, to be clear: I am not implying that the ACT is a quick fix, nor am I implying that it is the right test for everyone. I am, however, suggesting that a certain percentage of students (1/3 or so, in my experience) will naturally do better on the ACT than on the current SAT. (Of the rest, about 1/3 will score better on the SAT, and the remaining 1/3 will do about the same on both). That said, I’ve witnessed more than one student struggle with the SAT for months and see only modest improvements, then switch to the ACT and end up with perfect or near-perfect scores in only a few months.

After that happened to me for the third or so time, I started insisting that everyone who didn’t have a clear, compelling reason for taking the SAT start off by taking a full practice SAT and a full practice ACT. If they absolutely can’t stand — or, less frequently, absolutely love — one of the tests, they don’t have to finish it because, well, that’s their answer right there. But if they’re in the middle zone, they can weigh the pros and cons of each and at least know that they’re making an informed decision rather than jumping to look for a quick fix when they hit a wall a few months down the line. (By the way, I’m writing this about the move from SAT to ACT rather than ACT to SAT because, in my experience, people applying to competitive colleges who start out focusing on the ACT tend to have good reasons for doing so.)

So, if you are just starting the test-prep process, or are the parent of a student just starting the test-prep process, please, please do not simply assume that you or your child should automatically take the SAT simply because it’s the default option. It doesn’t matter if the guidance counselor has never mentioned the ACT. It doesn’t matter if everyone in your town/school is taking the SAT. It doesn’t even matter if your tutor hasn’t suggested it — tutors tend to recommend what they feel most comfortable tutoring, and tutors who know the SAT better than the ACT tend to recommend the SAT. Unless you are absolutely rocking the SAT, print out an ACT and see how you do.

And yes, it stinks to have to take not one but two diagnostic tests, but the payoff can be huge, in terms of time, stress, and results.